We're back! After a break of rather more years than we care to admit, GN Israel returns to your inbox, and Israel has kept right on making good news without us. Grab a coffee, this is a big one to catch up on.
Let's start with the cheque that made headlines around the world: Visa has agreed to buy Israeli fraud-prevention firm BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash. BioCatch, whose behavioural-intelligence technology reads typing patterns and touch gestures to spot fraudsters before they strike, already protects some 760 million users across 1.8 billion devices for more than 350 banks worldwide. Not bad for a company that only two years ago was valued at a mere $1.3 billion. What's Hebrew for “nice markup”? We're still working on it.
The wider economy is holding its own too. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, exports jumped 38% year-on-year in May, and the shekel has been trading at its strongest levels against the dollar in around three decades, which the markets are reading as a vote of confidence rather than a headache. Worth a moment's reflection: this is the same currency that was born on 4 September 1985, when the government lopped three zeros off the old, inflation-ravaged shekel as part of the Economic Stabilization Plan, at a time when prices were racing ahead at something like 450% a year. From that to a three-decade high is quite a journey. Cybersecurity, enterprise AI and deep tech remain the biggest draws for investors, so Startup Nation appears to be very much open for business.
Over at the Weizmann Institute, scientists have uncovered a mechanism by which sildenafil — the active ingredient in Viagra — may interfere with the process that lets cancer cells spread from a tumour to other organs. The findings, published in the journal Cancer Research, still need to hold up in human trials, but if they do, doctors could gain a cheap, widely available new weapon against metastasis. GN doesn't always come in a fancy new pill; sometimes it's been sitting in the medicine cabinet all along.
Not to be outdone, a Hebrew University team led by Dr Hagit Masika, under Professors Howard Cedar and Tommy Kaplan, published a study this month in Nature Communications showing that individual cells age at very different rates within the same body — a finding that could reshape our understanding of cancer and other age-related disease. Two world-class institutions, two breakthroughs, one very good month for Israeli science.
On the water front, Israel continues to be the country everyone else studies when they run short of the stuff. Desalination now supplies roughly three-quarters of the nation's water, a seventh plant — the Western Galilee facility, to be named Birkat Miriam — is due to open this year, and farmers are running drones and AI-driven sensors over their fields to save water, fertiliser and pesticide all at once. It was David Ben-Gurion who insisted, against no small amount of skepticism, that the Negev was worth fighting for and piped water there via the National Water Carrier, completed in 1964. Six decades on, the grandchildren of that stubborn optimism are running the pumps and sensors. A desert nation teaching the world how not to be thirsty. Still GN after all these years.
Sporting GN this week comes from Tokyo, where the Israeli women's lacrosse team won bronze at the World Lacrosse Women's Championship — the country's first-ever medal in the competition, with Sam Fisher scoring a hat-trick in the medal game. Meanwhile in Abu Dhabi, Israeli grapplers picked up medals across several age categories at the World Jiu-Jitsu Championships, Nimrod Ryder among them with bronze in the men's under-85kg division. Small country, large trophy cabinet.
On the concert stage rather than the playing field, Tel Aviv-based composer Hana Ajiashvili has been named winner of the 2026 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, one of the most coveted honours in contemporary composition, for her choral work “Riddle.” The piece sets a knotty verse-riddle by Yehuda Halevi, the 12th-century Spanish-Hebrew poet and philosopher: “What is thin and empty and smooth… yet has blood flowing from its mouth?” The answer, a quill used to sign death warrants, is as unsettling now as it was nearly a millennium ago, and the jury praised Ajiashvili for letting that darkness surface gradually through the music rather than announcing it. The work receives its world premiere with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal in October. A medieval Spanish poet, a Georgian-born Israeli composer, a Canadian orchestra: it takes a certain kind of people to keep a nine-hundred-year-old riddle so very much alive.
And tourism is showing genuine signs of life: visitors from the US and Canada were up 73% year-on-year in June. Slowly but surely, people are remembering why they used to come. We'd welcome them back with open arms, and frankly, so would the falafel stands.
Closer to home, France and the UK posted the sharpest growth in new immigrants arriving last year, a reminder that however loud the noise gets, plenty of people still look at Israel and see home. It is, after all, an ingathering with a rather longer memory than any one news cycle. Baruch haba'im, and welcome indeed.